Work products, including food products, are sliced or otherwise portioned by processes in accordance with customer needs as well as to remove waste or undesirable sections of the work product/food products. For example, the top slice of pork or beef butt is removed by slicing and discarded. As another example, chicken breasts are sliced in accordance with customer specifications to produce items such as chicken breast sandwiches, chicken breast strips, etc. Often the breast meat is too thick to be appropriate for the end use and thus is sliced to reduced thickness. It is important that the slicing be carried out accurately to meet product specifications for cooking, etc. In some cases, it is necessary to slice each individual piece of meat to a different thickness for simultaneously producing multiple end products or to achieve a specified total weight for one piece. To achieve this goal, precision in slicing is essential.
The foregoing cutting/slicing operations could be carried out by hand, but at this point in time, such operations are more commonly performed with processing equipment. For example, commonly the food product will be carried along the belt of a lower conveyor mounted on a supporting frame. A second, upper conveyor is positioned so that its belt extends generally parallel to and spaced from the lower conveyor belt. The upper conveyor cooperates with the lower conveyor to transport the food product past a slicing device, such as an oscillating knife, rotary saw or band saw, positioned between the upper and lower conveyor belts. A top slice separator plate can be mounted downstream of the slicing device, between the upper and lower conveyor belts, in an effort to separate the top slice from the bottom slice rather than having to manually remove the top slice from the bottom slice.
A drawback of the foregoing apparatus is that the rigid or substantially rigid upper and lower conveyor belts used to “pull” the food product past the band saw or oscillating knife deforms the food product while it is being cut. As a result, the final resulting thickness is different for each piece of sliced meat after it is allowed to relax again. The thicker pieces are deformed more than thinner pieces when squeezed into the same dimension between the upper and lower conveyor belts, resulting in variability in the deformation; thus the accuracy of slicing to specific thicknesses is imprecise.
Also using existing technology, it is necessary to adjust the spacing between the upper and lower conveyors to accommodate different types of food products being sliced or to accommodate food products form a different source that is of a different average thickness from the food product last processed. Although it may be critical to make this adjustment in conveyor spacing, not infrequently such adjustment is forgotten or missed by production workers, which can cause not only damage to the food product and equipment, but also significant variation in the finished thickness of the food product.
Also, prior to processing of the food product, various techniques are used to analyze the food product to ascertain its size, shape, weight, contour, and other physical attributes. This analysis is commonly carried out by using scanning techniques. Thereafter, the scanning data is analyzed by a computer operating under scanning software to determine the physical characteristics of the food product and also how to slice or otherwise portion the food product to achieve desired end products. However, not infrequently the food product, perhaps due to being still partially frozen or for other reasons, does not “sit flat” on the conveyor belt as it passes the scanning station. It would be advantageous to “flatten” or otherwise cause the workpiece to assume its “natural” configuration during the scanning process.
The present invention seeks to address the above-noted and other shortcomings of existing equipment available for analyzing and processing work products, including food products.